Nick Scott is proud to see his defense stand tall in recent weeks as the Bengals needed wins to claw back to 3-3.
Scott's been shaky on the back end to start this season (40.5 Pro Football Focus grade), but the secondary's done enough to keep things on track entering the bye week.
"A big thing that we say in that room is yards don't equal points," Scott said on Monday. "Which is basically saying, you can take the ball from the one-yard line all the way to the one-yard line, but if you don't get in the end zone, we did our job. So we're never concerned about explosive plays or anything like that. Obviously, we don't want to have too many of them. We want to eliminate those. But at the end of the day, once you get in that red area, you still got to punch it in and we take a lot of pride in not making that easy for teams."
Cincinnati struggled with multiple 20-plus yard pass plays allowed on Sunday, but they buckled down in the red zone like Anarumo's units have done so many times before.
"He's the spirit, he's a leader," Scott said about Cincinnati's defensive coordinator. "We got other guys who have been here for a while, who take on that role as well. He kind of sets the tone and the identity and we're following whatever he has for us, whatever he puts in front of us, we're gonna attack it and do whatever we can to make sure this team is successful."
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